White House Provided DNC With Top-Secret Information

By Bob WoodwardThe Washington PostWASHINGTON

The White House supplied top-secret intelligence information to the
Democratic National Committee to block a Latvian businessman with alleged
ties to organized crime from attending a $25,000-a-person fund-raising
dinner with President Clinton, according to government officials and other
sources.

The effort was successful, and the businessman, Grigori Lout-chansky,
who had been formally invited to attend the DNC fund-raising dinner in
1995, was abruptly disinvited.

In the course of the episode, political operatives in the White House
and the DNC gained access to and disseminated information gathered by some
of the nation's most sensitive intelligence-gathering methods. Many did not
have the required high-security clearances to receive such information.

Officials involved in the incident said that while checking
Loutchansky's background, the White House National Security Council
reported to the political affairs office there that the National Security
Agency (NSA) was monitoring his international telephone calls.

Loutchansky's firm, Nordex, allegedly was associated with Russian
organized crime organizations, officials said. The political affairs
office, in turn, reported to the DNC about the monitoring program,
officials said.

"This was top secret, and it further demonstrates the total
politicization of all intelligence and White House operations," said one
senior official. "Anything and everything was done in the name of
fund-raising."

The administration has been embarrassed repeatedly by reports that a
number of felons, drug dealers and others with unsavory backgrounds
attended White House coffees and DNC fund-raisers with the president, who
has acknowledged that screening procedures were too lax.

The latest disclosure has left Democratic Party sources wondering
whether future efforts to run a full check on a fund-raising dinner guest
might backfire. "You really are damned if you do and damned if you don't,"
one source said.

A Latvian who now lives in Israel, Loutchansky, who once met briefly
with Clinton, is a controversial figure who has been barred from entering
the United States, Canada and Britain. His attorney, Thomas Spencer Jr.,
disputed the reports of his client's alleged ties to organized crime.

"It's an outrageous, false allegation," Spencer said Monday. "Everywhere
in Europe where that's been printed he's either sued and won or it's been
retracted." Spencer added that "we have no way of knowing what the sources
are" behind the intelligence information.

The NSA spends billions of dollars each year monitoring electronic
communications around the world, and it zealously guards its sources and
methods, which include satellites, microwave and more traditional radio and
electronic communications interception equipment.

The Loutchansky telephone intercepts were considered "sensitive
compartmented information," which meant the intelligence was to be
distributed only to named individuals with the highest government security
clearances.

The Loutchansky incident began when the DNC, concerned about a foreign
national attending a presidential dinner, asked the White House to run a
check on the Latvian.

According to one source, the NSA monitored conversations between
Loutchansky and Sam Domb, a New York real-estate executive and DNC donor
who was planning to contribute $25,000 so that Loutchansky could attend a
July 20, 1995, dinner with Clinton at the Mayflower Hotel.

A senior government official Monday confirmed the NSA monitoring of
Loutchansky in 1995, but maintained that although the NSA had an extensive
file of intercepted international Loutchansky phone calls, it contains none
between Loutchansky and Domb, an American citizen.

Federal law, executive orders and NSA policy all prohibit the NSA from
intercepting phone calls of U.S. citizens except under unusual
circumstances.

Another source insisted that specific information about a Loutchansky
phone call with Domb was passed to the DNC.

Whatever the case, the NSA's monitoring of Loutchansky and his
Austria-based firm, Nordex, illustrates the degree to which the customary
barriers between White House and intelligence officials broke down in the
1995-96 election cycle.

"I can't think of any reason why information of this type should have
ever been given to the DNC," said Stewart Baker, the NSA's general counsel
from 1992 to 1994.